Vi Skal til Home!

Our last day in Denmark was filled with food, scenic driving and snow.

My mom had been mentioning a farmhouse famous for its aebleskiver (sort of the Danish equivalent of a beignet). And I'd been interested in driving, so I hopped behind the wheel and put on my 360° vision to be sure not to drive over any bicyclists or pedestrians (both of whom have the right-of-way in Denmark, making roundabouts extra interesting for a U.S. driver).

We merged onto the E20 and headed south at 130 km/hr. The E20 in this part of the world looks just like I-77, like an interstate in Anywhere, USA, except with windmills and Danish churches popping up on the countryside.


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This map is a little deceptive because we didn't actually go to Bøgede. Instead, near Bøgede, we cut off down winding, narrow backroad through marshy farmland. It was beautiful and remote, and we even saw a pheasant. We ended up at Malerklemmen, a restored farmhouse complete with thatch. Thatch is quintessentially Danish but also rare these days because the fire risk makes for prohibitive insurance rates. Malerklemmen is an extremely popular hole-in-the wall kind of place, comparable to the Dan'l Boone Inn in Boone, NC, where you can get traditional fare in a farmhouse setting and the line to eat is out the door.

We ordered three lattes and a plate of aebleskiver. Aebleskiver are warm dough balls sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with fruit preserves. We ate them huddled at a tiny, warped table in one of Malerklemmen's many small rooms, packed with Danish families and taxidermied animal heads.

On the way back to the E20, the fascinating sky we'd been remarking on finally opened up and pelted us with snowflakes. It was a light, non-sticking snow, but between Malerklemmen and our next stop in Greve, the temperature dropped by 15-20°.

Greve is the town where Mormor lives and it's also where Morfar (mother's father) has been buried for nearly 20 years. We wrapped ourselves as tightly as possible in scarves and stuff and visited Morfar's grave. It was around 4, so daylight was disappearing fast. We didn't stick around to do much exploring in the graveyard, but it would've been a pretty walk. Danish landscape design is beautiful. The graves we did pass were decorated with fir boughs, wreaths and sculpted bushes. This scene will be filled with color again in the summertime.

Afterward, we visited Mormor's house to warm up and have a few pieces of chocolate before dinner. Mormor had asked Uncle Ole to pick up some Leysieffer chocolate on his last trip to Germany in honor of my dad and our last name. Later, Mormor came to Karlslunde, and my mother cooked salmon and little potatoes and red cabbage. Delish.

And that was that. Two weeks in Denmark. Interesting; we saw almost no cell phones on this trip. There were people pushing shopping carts in the mall, and everywhere people were eating (at the bus stop, on their bikes, everywhere with the eating), but almost nobody yakking it up on the cellies. Weird! I thought the cell phone thing was a global epidemic. But maybe people were too busy eating to talk. That chill-to-the-bone weather, along with the walking/biking you have to do to get places, makes you want to eat all the time. That's probably why, even though I consumed around 6 lb of butter during these past two weeks--plus pastry, liver paste, rejeost, cheeses, rice pudding, chocolate and beer--I came back lighter than when I left.

A 10-hour plane trip later, my dad and I hit Atlanta and sunny, 80° Florida weather after that.

Vi Skal til Odense

Pictures from our trip to Odense.

I remember working on the NC Tourism account when Bath, North Carolina, celebrated its tricentennial. Three hundred years was a very big deal.

Odense had its 1,000th birthday nearly 20 years ago. It was founded in 988 (amazing how they can whittle it down to the exact year, after 1,000 years). Two hundred years ago, Hans Christian Andersen was born here. You used to have to board a ferry to get from Copenhagen to Odense. Now you pay a bunch of money and drive across this bridge. It's called the "Great Belt" and is the second-longest suspension bridge in the world, connecting the largest Danish Island, Sealand, to the second-largest Danish island, Fyn. When it opened 10 years ago, I think it was the world's longest suspension bridge, but just afterward, a suspension bridge opened in Japan that beat out the Great Belt by about 300 meters. It's a beautiful bridge, but it doesn't feel that long when you're driving over it. After all, it's only a little over a mile in reality.

As I mentioned, H. C. Andersen was born in Odense about 200 years ago. On the anniversary of his birthday in 2005, the city put H. C. Andersen-style paper-cutting sculpture all over. They're very proud of this famous Dane. Here's a funky, very Danish-looking sculpture in his honor--the three faces of Hans Christian Andersen. When my mom was in the Odense newspaper because of her dissertation on Moliere in the Danish theatre, they took a great picture of her in front of this statue.

Speaking of my mom and Moliere, that's why we made the trip to Odense on this freezing cold, windy Saturday. My mom had tickets to a production of Scapin directed by Emil Hansen. My dad and I couldn't exactly understand what was being said, but watching the actors and set made for great entertainment. The floor was red sand, and the costumes were all shades of pink and gray. Great wigs and great use of motion and space on a WWII bunker-turned-stage situated in a theatre that used to be an old sugar factory.

Anywho, one of the main attractions of Odense is a nice walking/shopping district. Of course, being Saturday, many of the stores--where we might have pretended to shop for 5,000 KR peacoats or adorable 900 KR shoes to escape the face-numbing cold--were closed by 3 p.m. Instead, we found warmth (and more organ music) in several of the city's cathedrals. St. Knud's actually has the skeleton of King Knud/Canute on display under glass. That was gnarly. Danish churches almost always have an elaborate model ship or two dangling from the ceiling, probably to provide holy protection to the sailors, since so many Danes throughout history made their livelihood on the water. Danish churches don't always have stained glass, but this little circle caught my eye.

This sign caught my eye, too. This bageri (bakery) went out of their way to advertise their Kranzekage, a multi-layered celebration cake. Little did we know, we should've picked one up to eat with Champagne at midnight in honor of Mortensaften.

Mortensaften: On the drive home, we passed countless window with candles lit in them. Danes love candlelight, so I shrugged it off as a Danish Saturday night thing. Then we pulled into Crepes o Bøf, the crepes restaurant where we were going to do dinner for our last free evening of this trip, and the waitstaff informed us there was no regular menu, only a buffet for 300 KR a piece. That's $60/person not including drinks and tip. None of the three of us were nearly hungry enough to warrant a 1,000 KR dinner tab, sooooo we went home and enjoyed a delicious asparagus soup and some nice open-faced sandwiches.

Turns out it was Mortensaften, which my mother remembers vaguely. She couldn't quite put her finger why the Danes do what they do on this night: they light candles and eat duck or goose along with a special kind of roll. She called Mormor to school us on Danish customs. Apparently, St. Martin didn't want to become a bishop, so he hid in a barn amongst some geese. The geese made noise that gave him away, so on the eve of St. Martin's Day, Danes punish geese-kind by eating them. Of course, goose is a large and expensive meal, so many Danes actually eat ducks on Mortensaften. Poor fowl.